Tuesday, March 25, 2014

It is significant that the question of
the impact of the 60s on the non-Western world is always framed as the
struggle of intellectuals and artists from the lesser nations to come to
terms with their own sense of artistic or intellectual inadequacy. The
art scene in Third World countries had always lagged behind, it seemed,
trying to catch up with a tectonic force that had swept the globe with
unbound youthfulness and energy. The pressure was on the Third World
artist to surrender and to produce.

For the Iranian visual artist of the
decade the main preoccupation was always two pronged: How to be modern
in an age that demanded non-conformity, rebelliousness, and breaking
away from tradition, and how to preserve a distinct identity as the only
way to lessen the pressure of measuring up to an ideal of Western art
whose site of origin was always elsewhere. It is the pull between these
two forces that constitutes the zeitgeist of the 60s for the
Third World artist. At one end, values of the decade were being
harangued as revolutionary, groundbreaking, unprecedented, and
universal. The youth rebelled against state domination in all aspects of
life, against the one-dimensional organizational man, the shackles of
conformity. The Vietnam War became a pretext for questioning the status
quo as well as the power structure. At the other end, the Third World
artist was facing another challenge, one that his 50s' predecessors, for
whom "originality was submerged in the effort to absorb new outlooks,
and to learn and master new techniques"[1] didn't concern themselves with. It was a time when the question of originality was posed with increasing passion and urgency.

It was the Armenian Iranian Marcos
Grigorian who, having graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in
Rome, returned to Iran in 1954 to open a gallery and to prepare the
ground for modernist artists in Tehran to explore their own roots.[2] In his Galerie Esthetique in Tehran, alongside works of modernists, he put on display works of traditional artists like qahvehkhaneh painters.[3] He was also one of the organizers of the 1st Tehran Biennial in 1958.

Photograph of Marcos Grigorian

Marcos Grigorian, mud, hay, found objects

1st Tehran Biennial poster (Marcos Grigorian was one of the organizers).

Grigorian was an influential teacher at
the University of Tehran's Fine Arts Academy. He encouraged his students
to look for elements of their own popular culture. This was in direct
contrast to the universalist orientation of 50s artists like Jalil
Ziapour who embraced Western mandates in an age when this was seen as
an acceptable means to progress. Grigorian's works inspired many 60s
Iranian artists, notably Hossein Zenderoudi, to look for and make use of
native materials and themes. In one painting Zenderoudi copies,
scene-by-scene, the theme of a qahvehkhaneh painting. One must
view this newfound interest in religious Iranian elements against the
backdrop of an American-led coup in 1953 and the attempt by the Shah of
Iran to project himself as heir to 2500 years of civilization.
Government organizations only commissioned works that emphasized the
pre-Islamic grandeur of Persia.

Indeed a group of modernist artists were increasingly appealing to religious symbolism to bring originality to their works.[4] Art critic Karim Emami called them "Saqqakhaneh" artists, to underline their shared sense of religious fetishism.[5]
A Parson's School of Art graduate, Monir Shahroudi-Farmanfarmaian was
mesmerized by mirror-works in mosques and Islamic architecture, as well
as by primitive textile patterns. Also a student at Accademia di Belle
Arti in Italy, Parviz Tanavoli came back to Iran to hunt for artifacts -
locks, keys, knobs, grillwork, prayers, talismanic messages, tribal
rugs and gravestones - not only to collect but to incorporate them into
his sculptures. Zendroudi, educated in Paris, painted elaborate canvases
filled with numerological charts, qahvehkhaneh themes, and inscriptions on vestments. Faramarz Pilaram [see image] brought gold and silver paint to a canvas to depict the Mosques of Isfahan.
All invariably made ample use of Persian calligraphy, which opened the
door to a whole new set of meanings and interpretations.

This did not mean that they believed in
the religious/Iranian content of their works. They saw in these objects,
detached from their universe of meaning, the power to break free from
the trap of copying the West, and a way to come up with an authentic art
movement. In fact, the question of giving wing to a "movement" was
probably the reason why "Saqqakhaneh" was used with increasing
frequency by cultural authorities, because they considered it as the
beginning of a genuine artistic movement that could put Iranian art on
the Western artistic map.[6]

"Saqqakhaneh" exhibition poster, Qobad Shiva, 1977

Outside of modern arts, things were a
little different. Blighted by failed attempts during the 40s and 50s to
establish a participatory government that would reflect the will of a
people hungry for autarky in the colonial era[7],
the Iranian political milieu moved to a different plane in the 60s. The
ease in political crackdowns of the 50s (following the 1953 Coup that
reinstated the Shah) helped the politicization of the decade. Many
intellectuals and writers, who had overwhelmingly formed leftist,
secular groups previously, couched the words in religious symbolism
because in that way they could voice their demands without being
redbaited. This is a period when the call for "going back to roots" is
often heard in intellectual circles.[8]
In 1962, the same year that modernist Iranian artists stage their first
show in the US coinciding with the 3rd Tehran Biennial, Jalal
al-Ahmad's Occidentosis was published. According to Al-e Ahmad,
the disease plaguing Third World countries, as the title of his book
suggests, is their inability to hold on to an independent identity.
Instead, he advocates a return to roots presumed lost in the fever of
catching up with the West.

During the 60s, the official Center for
the Visual Arts in Iran became heavily active and this was in large part
due to the patronage of Farah Pahlavi, the Queen, whose husband did not
necessarily share her enthusiasm for the arts.[9]
Many of the artists who had studied abroad or had chosen to live in
exile in the 50s, were invited to come back to the country with
prospects of a lucrative career. The Center commissioned works by many
of the young artists of the decade, including Shahroudi-Farmanfarmaian,
Abol Saeedi, Ahmad Esfandiari, Mohammad Javadipour, Zenderudi and
Tanavoli, Massoud Arabshahi, Manuchehr Yektaii, Sirak Melkonian and
Mohsen Vaziri-Moghaddam. Their works appeared in urban public spaces as
well as in hotels and in the houses of the wealthy; needless to say,
these works were void of any political content.

Many of the above-mentioned artists didn't follow the calling of their Saqqakhaneh
colleagues to go back to their roots and stayed well within the
established Western modernist tradition. In short, there is not a single
thread that can connect all the various artistic activities that were
taking place within the country in the 60s. Few among them, like Hanibal
Alkas, harbored revolutionary sentiments but these never caught on
until the late 70s. Because of the official support, the visual arts
thrived. Tehran Contemporary Art Museum [see image] under the tutelage
of Kamran Diba, who was a relative of the Queen as well as the Museum's
architect, acquired works of notable Western artists like Alberto
Giacometti, Umberto Boccioni, Frank Stella, René Magritte, Joan Miró and
Alexander Calder, and in this way built a reputation for the Iranian
modern arts establishment.

The dominant narrative regarding the 60s
as a revolutionary decade tends to overlook several developments that
preceded and ran parallel to the decade's subversive potentials.

First, the youth rebellion owed a great
deal of its intellectual vitality to the liberation movements inside and
outside the West. The Third World "Project" unleashed a tremendous wave
of dissent across the globe and against the violent legacy of
colonialism and Cold War brinkmanship. Coming in the wake of the Indian
Independence movement and inspired by the Gandhian non-violence
philosophy, the three major leaders of the former colonies joined hands
in the Javanese island of Bandung in 1955 to denounce the hegemony of
the West.[10]
They ultimately established a force that refused to abide by the
bipolar mandates of the Cold War. It is this very force that, aided by
Third World artists and intellectuals, inspired the rebel youth in
Western countries to stage their own opposition to the power structure.
Within the US, the Civil Rights Movement broke ground for a critical
evaluation of racism and its relationship to the power structure upon
which the Empire was built. It was Oakland, rather than Berkeley, that
in the 60s became the site of the struggle against imperialism. Both the
Civil Rights and the Third World Movements created a great wave of
questioning the dominant ideological hold of Western nations.

Second, the 60s is thought of as unique
decade, unmatched in the way it unfurled its colors, the way it incited
the creative energies of Western boys and girls, the way it fought the
powers that be. We are told that the 60s was an irregularity, an
anomaly, a schism in the history of Western Civilization. For American
conservative politicians and scholars like Alan Bloom, Newt Gingrich,
and Robert Borke, the 60s was infested with hedonism and bad faith. They
scolded (and still do) its tendency to ignore the foundations of
Western Civilization and they decry an educational system that fails to
teach students classics of Western literature and arts. To them, the
decade, and its remnants was a disgrace to high-browed values of the
white man.

This impression of the 60s as a Western
wonder is not limited to conservative social scientists. Leftist and
counterculture thinkers, too, saw it as an unprecedented decade in which
idealism reigned supreme and the society moved towards challenging the
capitalist order. They seldom, if ever, pay attention to the creative
power and theoretical foundation of commercial culture. Through them, we
also tend to overlook the global implications of a commercial apparatus
that thirsts after channeling desires. The same cultural revolution
that took place on the streets in the West in the 60s - anti-Vietnam War
protest, sexual liberation, student rebellion, Rock 'n' Roll,
Hippie-ism, Woodstock, avant-garde-ism, non-conformity, and
rebelliousness - was echoed in the commercial world: "American business
was undergoing a revolution in its own right during the 1960s," argues
Thomas Frank in the conquest of cool, "a revolution in marketing practice, management thinking, and ideas about creativity."[11] Frank lists several books (The Organizational Man, The Human Side of Enterprise, Up the Organization)
in which business pundits laid out their manifesto: the thrust of New
Business values and their antagonism to the fetid air of the 50s.

The 60s is the site of a major explosion
in visual culture and nowhere is this more evident than in the
commercial world. While we tended to locate the social movement within
intellectual and artistic activities, European and American managers,
graphic designers, and marketing agents were busy finding new ways to
construct desires and to influence their audiences on the streets and in
homes. Advertisement shifted gear to stage an uprising against mass
society. New ads mocked and made fun of the Square culture. The "Cola
Wars" between 1960-63 is emblematic of this shift in public relations.
Pepsi cast itself as the soft drink for "those who think young... a
modern enthusiasm for getting more out of life."[12]
The 60s managers emphasize creativity, non-conformity, rebellion,
individualism, being hip, and thinking young. TV sets comfortably lodged
in suburban homes, ad agencies in full feather, the public is treated
to an increasing number of visual registers whose power and impact
remains yet to be analyzed by social scientists for whom the power and
influence of the commercial culture is seldom a topic of interest.

Yet, it is simply enough to look at our
surroundings and realize how successful the Marketing and Advertising
Revolution of the 60s has been. "Design" has now become the ultimate art
form and our visual space is inundated with signs and images that
determine not only what we should buy but also how we should be. In a
sense, selective values of the 60s (Think Young, United Colors, Do It!,
the Revolution Will Not Be Televised) were kept alive by the new
managers and ad agencies that built their edifice in the "Sweet 60s."

Of the few Iranian books written on the decade that found their way into the market, one is by journalist Faramarz Barzegar. The Sociology of Hippie-ism
is a travel account of the writer to the US. "The strongest, most
exciting, most colorful encounters and events, and at the same time the
most peaceful and interesting social, political, artistic and literary
movements took place in this decade. But there is a single thread that
runs through all of these: a fresh, totally new, and socially active
element that human civilization has never seen in its thousand years of
evolution in such magnitude, diversity and power. And this element was
called the 'youth movement' and included 55 to 75 per cent of the world
and manifested itself under every circumstance."[13]
The book is a singsong to the 60s not because it is void of strong,
emotional criticism of the decade's anarchic tendencies, rootless
rebelliousness, and fascination with the spiritual power of an imaginary
East but because of it. Its overall tone is supportive of the youth and
their struggle to unleash the creative powers of the Social. It
reflects the views of such figures as Henri Lefebvre, Stanley Kauffmann,
and Herbert Marcuse, the latter in a personal interview. It offers an
enthused analysis of the music Hair, the avant-garde production Oh! Calcutta!
and a profile of 60s activists like Angela Davis, Jane Fonda, and
Mohammad Ali (Clay). But nowhere do we see in the book a connection
between commercial culture and visual culture. The same tendency exists
today. The 60s for us is still the story of the counterculture.

Book cover, Sociology of Hippieism, Farmarz Barzegar, 1972

The Sociology of Hippie-ism
shows how fascination with the "youth culture" was in full swing in Iran
during the same period. The youth culture inspired dozens of
periodicals aiming to cater to the demands of a young population whose
government and notorious security apparatus did not tolerate the
remotest forms of protest. Hence, many of the modernist artists of the
decade in Iran found another way of expressing their concerns - through
using a religious language that ultimately culminates in the 1979
Revolution. "In the cultural lexicon of Iran, the 'West' did not simply
represent a higher model to be emulated, but an imposing presence on its
national autonomy," maintains Shiva Balaghi, "Their works suggests that
modernity in the Iranian context was a complex field of negotiation and
accommodation - and not a simple act of imitation and mimicry."[14]

Chelcheragh magazine cover, April 2010 (an appeal to the values of the 60s)

For the Iranian artists of today, the
question of originality is still as strong a preoccupation as it was for
those of the 60s, as is also the enigma of combating the Western
ideological and commercial stranglehold. Three decades into a revolution
that sought to establish a new identity for Iranians, artists are now
trying to divest themselves of the religious symbolism that
characterized the works of their predecessors. Almost all Saqqakhaneh artists of the 60s left the country after the Revolution.[15]
Meanwhile, the state is happy to open the country's doors to a rainbow
of products that construct desires through an aggressive visual
language. Our cityscape is studded with increasingly taller and wider
billboards that flood our field of vision with impunity. In the midst of
this circus of messages and visual assaults, the daunting task of
artists is how to come up with a visual language that can be heard above
the din of commercial culture and the clamor of originality.

[3] "Coffeehouse" painters were known for the religious themes of their pardeh
or drapes that told in pictorial form the story of religious legends.
When hung on one of the walls of a coffeehouse, these drapes would
become the backdrop of a one-man theater where a reciter of epic poetry
would tell the story depicted on the drape for the clientele.

[4]
In conversation with performance artist and writer Jinoos Taghizadeh,
winter 2010, Tehran. Taghizadeh maintains that religious codes were used
by Western-oriented Iranian artists as a political tool to oppose
cultural oppression under the monarchy.

[5] A water fountain, saqqakhaneh
serves the thirsty in an arid climate. It is surrounded by mementos and
objects offered as gifts. Most cities in Iran no longer have these
fountains.

[6] According to the 60s visual artist Abel Saeedi in a personal conversation, April 2010.

[7]
Notably the Constitutional Revolution of 1910 which ended with the
strong-arm rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925-41) and the coup against
Prime Minister Mohammad Mosadeq (1950-53), which brought back Reza
Shah's son, Mohammad-Reza, to the throne with the help of the US and the
UK.

[15]
Charles Hossein Zenderoudi left Iran for France in 1960 and chose to
remain there until today. Monir Farmanfarma left Iran immediately after
the revolution and returned only a decade and a half later. Parviz
Tanavoli migrated to Canada in 1982 and comes back to the country for
special events.

TEHRAN -- Sculptor Parviz Tanavoli has sued intruders who forced their way into his home in northern Tehran, taking a number of his works.

“Last night, about 20 people broke into my house using a crane and a
truck, and, acting wildly and ineptly, took 11 of my sculptures,” he
told the Persian service of ISNA on Monday.

“Nobody was at home when they arrived. People in neighboring houses
said that they broke the locks to enter my house,” he added.

“When I arrived home, I asked about the reasons for their action. They
said they were carrying out a court order. However they refused to show
me their documents until they left,” he stated.

In an agreement signed between Tanavoli and the Tehran Municipality in
2003, he transferred the ownership of his 58 sculptures and his house in
northern Tehran to the municipality on the condition that the house is
converted into a museum for his works.

“Shortly afterwards, they informed me that their plan to establish the
museum has been stopped and they no longer wanted to make a museum for
my works,” Tanavoli stated.

“I filed a lawsuit and six years later the court ruled that the house was to be returned to me,” he added.

He said that over the past few years, the municipality has acquired all the sculptures, some of which allegedly have been sold.

“A few months ago, I went to court for a decision on the ownership of
the artworks. The court ruled that the collection must remain in my
house until the court makes a final decision, but the break-in
occurred,” he said.

According Tanavoli, most of the artworks have been seriously damaged in transit.

So far, no official comment has been made about this issue and it is not clear where the sculptures have been taken.

Tanavoli, who usually makes large sculptures, is mostly known for his
series “Heech” depicting the Persian word “heech” (nil). His “Heech in
the Cage” is on display at the British Museum.

His works have been always warmly received at international auctions over the past few years.

His six foot tall sculpture “Oh Persepolis II”, was sold for $940,000 at Dubai Christie’s in October 2013.

4 comments:

Culture is where the reality meets the unknown, for only one medium of exchange in hollow bamboos singing the songs of cultures cultivating culture in eons of being cultured pearls in the musical strings.

Art has always been the dragging of humanity in the long haul to enlightenment, from the beginning of painting in caves and carving into stones, as well as co-creating culture that enriches life in earth.